It is hard for me to think about the Advent Theme of Peace without also thinking about what one of Christ’s near-contemporaries said about peace just a few years after most of the books in the New Testament were written.

“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

In another period of my life–the insufferable thirteen-year-old boy who already knows everything phase–I was a deeply committed opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment. Informed by several pamphlets distributed by the youth leaders at our church, I stalked the halls of Waller Junior High school just looking for hippies and feminists to punch (metaphorically) with my superior intellect and rhetorical skill. I knew, in the same way that young Mormons “know” so many things, that if three more states ratified the ERA, our society would be plunged into a morass of unisex bathrooms, women in combat, and people of the same gender getting married to each other.

When Wisdom’s acolytes did not return to divulge the location of the Child who would be King, Herod “sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under” Many, if not most, are incapable of complete recovery from such horrific loss.. . . . It is instructive that the massacre of the innocents follows rather than precedes the Christ Child’s coming. The joy of Advent neither prevented nor ameliorated the tragedy. —Fiona Givens, “On Solace”

This was going to be a post about the theme of love, traditionally observed on the second Sunday of the Advent Season, and perhaps it will be still. But before we get to love, we have to go through grief and work through one of the most difficult parts of the Advent narrative. We have to talk about the deaths of children.

The Voice of the People: Political Rhetoric in the Book of Mormon, by David Charles Gore. Maxwell Institute: Groundwork Books, 2019.

The Voice of the People is something that we need a lot more of in the Mormon Studies world: a book about the Book of Mormon that does not try to prove anything about its historical nature, or use it to illustrate a particular theological point, but rather makes it the basis for a productive engagement with an academic discipline and a cultural value.

The Holiday Seasons are a time for us to deepen our understanding of, and appreciation for God. And for me at least that means poetry. Not all poets are prophets, but all prophets are poets–and a few of them even got anthologized in the Bible. But there has been a lot of prophetic poetry since then, and a good bit of it is in the 2013 anthology Before the Door of God, edited by Jay Hopler and (Amazing BYU English Professor) Kimberly Johnson. The book covers devotional poetry from the ever-popular “beginning of time” through the present focusing, not entirely exclusively, on the English tradition. This is easily enough work for a lifetime, and I plan to make it my work during this year’s holiday season.

I’m not completely sure, but I am pretty sure that the first two scriptures I ever memorized came from the Book of James. James 1:5 (“if any of you lack wisdom. . . .”) is the standard starting point for the Joseph Smith story. And James 2:20 (“faith without works is dead”) was the standard retort (for a Mormon growing up in a Southern Baptist town) to the claim that we were “saved by faith.”

Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews is one of the three New Testament books (along with Acts and Revelation) that doesn’t really fit into the GOSPELS-EPISTLES organizing scheme. It probably isn’t by Paul. It is definitely not an epistle. And it may or may not be to the Hebrews. This is why it is situated after the Pauline Epistles–which are otherwise arranged by length, longest to shortest (Hebrews is much longer than the short epistles that precede it). The early Church Fathers didn’t quite know what to do with it, but they knew it was important

In preparing for my youth Sunday School lesson this morning, a scripture jumped out and bit me in the way that they sometimes do when you read something that you have read dozens of times before but all of a sudden notice that it means something that you never suspected it meant. The scripture was in the third chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians. 

Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh! For it is we who are the circumcision, who worship in the Spirit of God and boast in Christ Jesus and have no confidence in the flesh. (Phil. 3:2-3 NRSV)

Nineteenth-Century England produced many greater poets than Francis Thompson and many, many better poems than “The Hound of Heaven.” But it probably didn’t produce a better metaphor for God’s grace than this now-mostly-forgotten, 182-line divine Gothic romance first published in 1890.

Roland is good, and Oliver is wise,
both these vassals men of amazing courage:
once they are armed and mounted on their horses,
they will not run, though they die for it, from battle.
Good men, these Counts, and their words full of spirit.
Traitor pagans are riding up in fury.
Said Oliver: “Roland, look – the first ones,
on top of us – and Charles is far away.
You did not think it right to sound your olifant:
if the King were here, we’d come out without losses.
–“The Song of Roland,” Stanza 87

The “Song of Roland,” composed anonymously some time in the 11th century,  is one of a handful of poems now considered national epics–works like the Aurtherian legends, El Cid, and the Nibelungenlied that helped the emerging nation-states of Europe create a future by convincing everyone that they had a common past. “The Song of Roland” is a little bit closer to history than other national epics. Its principal heroes–Roland and Charlemagne–actual existed, and the Battle of Roncevaux in 778, which the poem describes, really occurred.

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation
–2 Corinthians 5:18

Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians presents us with a context that is difficult to understand. There is a good reason for this: it is not Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. It is at least his Third Letter to the Corinthians, and it may be an amalgamation of parts of his Third and Fourth Letters to the Corinthians. But we know that Paul refers to at least four letters to the Church at Corinth, and we know that only two of them appear in our scriptures. So we have to infer a lot.

Scholars today call the missing letter to the Corinthians “the Severe Letter” or “the Letter of Tears” after Paul’s description of it in 2 Cor. 2:4, “For I wrote you out of much distress and anguish of heart and with many tears.” The Severe Letter, most surmise, involved Paul chastising the Church for something that he perceived on a previous visit. The two most common contenders are the toleration of sexual immorality and the encouragement of rival Christian missionaries. Both explanations have plenty of partisans.

I recently had my first experience with designated drinkers–the opposite of designated drivers–who are assigned to drink heavily on behalf of someone who cannot or will not use alcohol. 

Anyone who spends much time writing things is probably familiar with the universal “dummy text” that begins Lorem ipsum dolor. Supposedly, typesetters in the 16th century used this scrambled Latin text to mock up books and show off designs. Lorem ipsum dolor now means something like, “don’t read the text; that will change when we have something better to say. Just look at the beautiful design. Oh, and also, something about pain.”

Sometime ago–I won’t say where or when–I was in a ward that got swept up in parties where people were expected to buy stuff. The two brands I remember most were “Creative Memories” and “Pampered Chef”–and something about Chinese magnets that were supposed to realign your feng shui or some such thing. Lots of people were into these businesses, and, for a few months, it seemed that there was a “party” every week or so that doubled as a ward activity

The Dialogue Foundation’s Board of Directors is pleased to announce that Taylor Petrey, Associate Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College, has been appointed the next Editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.

Petrey holds a BA in philosophy and religion from Pace University, and both an MTS  and a Th.D. degree from Harvard Divinity School in New Testament and Early Christianity. He joined the faculty of Kalamazoo College in 2010 and served as the Director of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality program from 2012 through 2016. He is currently chair of the Religion Department.

Over at Sunstone this week, the inimitable Andi Pitcher Davis is, inimitably, launching a year-long project in participatory performance art. It is an ingenious project, really, even for Andi, and that is saying a lot. It’s called “Books of Mormons.” Here is the official description.

Part One: Spooky Jewish Hell Dream

I do not know, and certainly cannot prove, that the “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream” number in the Book of Mormon musical is based on Peter’s remarkable dream in Acts 10:10-15. But it could have been. It is exactly the sort of image that I would use to try to convey to contemporary Latter-day Saints–dancing coffee cups and other forbidden items torturing the young Mormon with their forbiddenness and demanding to be consumed. I would probably throw in some cigarettes and beer–and maybe a Playboy or two. But you get the point. It was dream designed to confront Peter with the things that made him the most religiously uncomfortable.

This is not your BCC Gospel Doctrine Post for the week. But it is a post inspired by the first chapter of the Book of Acts, which is part of this week’s reading. It’s one of those passages that I’ve read before but never really noticed. It’s the time that the angels told the apostles to quit looking for God in the sky.

Human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolours the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.
                                    —Francis Bacon, Novum Organon

You are wrong. You are profoundly and disturbingly wrong about a spectacularly large number of things. You accept facts that are not facts, values that are incompatible with each other, and a fair number of truly dumb ideas about how to change the world. If you ever really understood the extent of your wrongness, you would never trust another word you said.

Matthew 26; Mark 14; Luke 22; John 18

Son of Man, Huh? What Does That Even Mean?
The four chapters in this lesson correlate, to a remarkable degree, the events leading up to Christ’s arrest by Jewish authorities on the Thursday night of Holy week. These events include the Last Supper, the prayer in Gethsemane, Judas’s betrayal of Jesus, and Peter’s thrice-repeated denial of his Master. I will use the text in Matthew as the basis for the lesson, adding in insights from the other Gospels as appropriate.

Barbara Brown Taylor is perhaps the best thinker and writer that I ever blew the chance to hear live. Several years ago, I attended a conference at which she and Miroslov Volf were the featured speakers. Volf was the opening plenary speaker, and Taylor was the closing plenary speaker. I was not familiar with Taylor at the time, and I had a fairly small menu of flights to choose from when I booked the flight. So I chose an evening flight back home that required me to miss the closing session. To make up for it, I bought An Altar in the World and read it in the flight. By the time I landed, I realized what a mistake I had made.

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought has long served as the journal of record for the intellectual and cultural life of the Mormon people. Thanks to five decades of work by editors, authors, and the Board, Dialogue  continues to provide space for some of the faith’s most vibrant thinking on cultural, historical, theological, and social issues. To further this mission, we have recently completed a transition that has made all content freely available on our new website at the moment of publication and given us a more substantial internet presence with web-only content. Beginning in 2020, we will transition our production operations to the University of Illinois Press. With these actions, Dialogue will retain its status as a crucial voice in modern Mormonism. To continue this tradition, and in accordance with the journal’s transition to a new production model, Dialogue’s Board of Directors announces a search for a new editor to take control starting with the Summer 2020 issue.

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Luke 12–17
John 11

The centerpiece of this week’s lesson comes in three interlinked parables about finding lost things. In the Christian tradition, the three parables have been given the titles “The Lost Sheep,” “The Lost Coin,” and “The Prodigal Son.” We need to keep in mind though, that Jesus did not name these parables–and sticking too closely to the traditional titles can cause us to focus our attention on the wrong things.

Matthew 18, Luke 10

The Sapiential, Constitutive, Consequential Kingdom of God
To read the Gospels is to become obsessed with a vision. And the name of the vision is “the Kingdom of God,” or, sometimes, “the Kingdom of Heaven” or just “the Kingdom.” It is the most powerful vision in any of the standard works, where it occasionally also goes by the name of “Zion.” It is the focus of nearly all of Christ’s parables, and of the vast majority of His teaching and ministry. And it remains one of the most poorly understood concepts in the churches that use His name.

Today is Palm Sunday, when we remember Jesus entering Jerusalem triumphantly on the back of a donkey. All four gospels tell the story, as well they should. It is the moment that Christ is recognized as the king that he is. As Mark relates it,

In “The Problem of Pain,” CS Lewis famously says that many people mistake the Father in Heaven for the Grandfather in Heaven—”a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves’ and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all.”

The Grandfather in Heaven is a perversion of the Christian doctrine of God because he does not ask anything of his followers. He doesn’t care if they eat ice cream for breakfast, or if they do their homework, or if they progress in any way into adulthood. He doesn’t have to deal with them when they are the spiritual equivalent of 30 years old and failing to launch. He just wants to make sure that everybody has a good time on his watch.

There is another common perversion of God the Father that rears its head from time to time in both Christian and Latter-day Saint circles. Let’s call him “The Godfather.” Unlike God the Father, the Godfather works through fear and intimidation. He gives us presents and helps us find our car keys, of course. And we may, from time, discreetly ask him to whack an enemy or two and make it looks like an accident. But, in exchange he demands our absolute loyalty. And if we fail him, we may end up sleeping with the fishes.

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Last night I dreamed about Hell. Here’s what it looked like.

It was a hilly region filled with big boulders that people were pushing, at great effort, in big circles. There were two groups of people in this version of hell–Mormons and ex-Mormons–and they were pushing the rocks in opposite, though circular, directions. Boulder pushing took most of their effort, but, when they passed each other on their circular paths, they summoned all of their remaining strength to shout accusations at each other in the form of two rhetorical questions. The Mormons shouted, “Why did you leave?” and the ex-Mormons shouted “Why do you stay?”

Readings: Matthew 13; Luke 8-13

“The Gospel writers, in their wisdom, left most of the parables as open narratives in order to invite us into engagement with them. Each reader will hear a distinct message and may find that the same parable leaves multiple impressions over time. . . . Reducing parables to a single meaning destroys their aesthetic as well as ethical potential. This surplus of meaning is how poetry and storytelling work, and it is all to the good.”

–Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus

This week we launch into the Kingdom Parables–those brief narratives in which Jesus tries to eff the ineffable and give ordinary mortals some frame of reference for talking about the Kingdom of God. This is beyond a hard sell. The Kingdom that Jesus spent most of his ministry talking about is an earthly kingdom, but it is like no earthly kingdom that has ever existed, and its governing logic is absolutely foreign to natural humanity.

But we have to see it to be it, so Jesus tells us about the parts–much like the blind men describing the elephant in the famous poem by John Godfrey Saxe. Like a mustard seed, the Kingdom starts small and becomes a place of shelter; like a fishing net, it draws in everyone and throws back what it can’t keep; like a great treasure, a person who knows about it will be willing to sacrifice everything to get it. And so on. These are all imperfect and incomplete, but every one of them contributes something to the picture, and, if we add them all up, we might be able to imagine the whole elephant.

Carolyn Homer makes an exceptionally strong case that we have a religious duty, as Mormons and as Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and these are two different things), to mourn with our Muslim brothers and sisters, to comfort them, and to share their burdens. I agree wholeheartedly.

And I am willing to go further still. I believe that we have a responsibility as both Latter-day Saints, and as citizens of a pluralistic democracy, to get to know our Muslim neighbors better, to understand them as we want them to understand us, and to love them as we want to be loved.

We have this responsibility with all of our neighbors, of course. It is basically what “the Gospel” means. But I believe that this responsibility is greater when it comes to those who practice Islam. There are several reasons for this. Here are three: